The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing by Domna C. Stanton (review)

This nuanced and thought-provoking book takes as its starting point Judith Butler's observation that '[t]erms of gender designation are […] never settled once and for all but are constantly in the process of being remade' (Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 10; quoted p. 1). Domna C. Stanton's study of gender in seventeenth-century French literature thus introduces the notion of 'dynamics' in order to underscore the way in which gender types across the period are formed and re-formed in 'a dynamic, dialectical process' (p. 4). Drawing on Foucault, Stanton shows how discourse can either reinforce or undermine the status quo, and, significantly, how a literary text can do both at once. The Introduction offers a useful overview of women in seventeenth-century France; notably, it argues against the scholarly trend that perceives women as playing a diminished political role in the second half of the century. The book is divided into two sections, the first dedicated to male writers and the second to female. Both sections of the book treat an intriguing mix of genres, and of canonical and non-canonical texts. Stanton is particularly interested in demonstrating how representations of gender intersect with social and political messages. The anonymously authored Caquets de l'accouchée (1622), for instance, a cluster of short comic texts that feature a male narrator eavesdropping on women, is set against the backdrop of the unpopular regency of Marie de Médicis, while the military campaigns of Louis XIV supply context for Racine's Iphigénie. Yet Stanton's study eschews black-and-white interpretations for complexity: it repeatedly shows how texts can be progressive in some ways, conservative in others. An especially fascinating chapter treats the 1681 memoirs of Mme de La Guette, which (as Stanton argues) combine fantasies of class and gender, with the female narrator seeking to adopt a position akin to that of a male aristocrat. Torn between praising traditional femininity and questioning it, between championing the king and lamenting his ingratitude, the narrative portrays a 'heroine at war with her selves' (p. 130). Stanton's reading of 'the double-voiced discourse' (p. 181) found in Mme de La Fayette's La Princesse de Montpensier is equally compelling, as she reveals how irony undercuts the moralistic language of the narrator, and how the 'gender-ambiguous' comte de Chabannes suggests a new model of masculinity (p. 193). However, the book's interpretations of male writers are occasionally less generous than those of female ones: if Stanton attributes double-voicedness to La Fayette, she denies it to Racine, whose Iphigénie she views as ultimately upholding paternal order and the absolutist state. Yet the book as a whole is an engaging, stimulating addition to Stanton's many decades of feminist scholarship. The Afterword is a brief meditation on strategies of feminist reading; in playfully self-deprecating terms, it evokes 'the lurking fear of sounding like some sage femme' (p. 212). But if this is indeed the discourse of a sage femme, it is very much one worth listening to.